import xlwt
wb = xlwt.Workbook(encoding="UTF-8")
uc = u"".join(unichr(0x0410 + i) for i in xrange(32)) # some Cyrillic characters
u8 = uc.encode("UTF-8")
ws = wb.add_sheet("demo")
ws.write(0, 0, uc)
ws.write(1, 0, u8)
ws.write(2, 0, xlwt.Formula("A1=A2"))
ws.write(3, 0, "ASCII is a subset of UTF-8")
wb.save("xlwt_write_utf8.xls")